Paper Girl by Beth Macy is a good book subtitled A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America. Macys grew up in Urbana, Ohio, graduating in 1982 from Urbana High School. There was a healthy economy, thriving schools, and middle class, that Macys, one of the poorer kids in her class, could aspire to.
Free trade, and anger over it, was cited in presidential election exit polls as a reason for Trump flipping Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan red in 2016. Macys writes that Democrats should have embraced unionism, a la Bernie Sanders, but instead, rural communities have been abandoned by the Democratic Party, leaving small town America available for the Republican Party to feed on. Local news, particularly in rural America, has been decimated, so people get their information from Facebook posts and press releases. This leads to a split of society, where people aren’t given real information and can easily descend into tribalism. Quoted is the philosopher Richard Rorty who in 1998 predicted that globalization and inequality would lead to class resentment, and someone would tap into it and be elected as a strongman, proclaiming that he’ll make the elites pay. Trump in 2024 won 91% of the counties lacking a professional news source.
Macys with her book went back to Urbana to write on what had become of the town. She notes that just 37% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree, and only 16% in Urbana. The mayor, Bill Bean, who took over his dad’s successful insurance business that started in 1866, says college is overrated and the town’s 16% college graduation rate doesn’t bother him. Also noted is how someone who ran against Bean and lost now runs a youth center that Urbana’s establishment blocked from receiving a $2M grant from the state.
When you’re working class, good schools and social connections are sustenance. However, the Urbana that Macys returned to featured schools with large numbers of parents yelling at teachers, and take their kids out, professing to homeschool them, but just not wanting to be responsible for their truancy when kids just weren’t showing up for school. It’s noted that homeschooling is now the fastest growing form of education in the country, with the gutting of public schools creating separate educational systems. When people lose faith in their schools, and what they can do for their kids, it's a crisis. If kids don’t see a way out, and low-income kids aren’t exposed to normal and good while at school, it’s too easy for them to become stuck.
Factories shut down, union jobs go away, leaving low paying jobs, and when there are good jobs, it can be hard for employers to be get good workers. Enough people couldn’t be found for skilled manufacturing jobs that the Biden Administration was subsidizing. The few who go away to college don’t return, so there’s no models for kids, leaving Urbana what Macys describes as a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place. She tells the story of recent Urbana High graduate Silas James and covers how something as basic as reliable transportation to a job or school can be so vital to someone's efforts. Macys also writes about how her older sister denied sexual abuse allegations by her daughter Liza, against her stepdad. It’s heartbreaking reading and while Paper Girl is a good book, it’s also a tough one.
